Happy Birthday, Moose!

Last week Sycely started talking about going to Moose's birthday party. Side note: Moose is a stuffed animal. She had all the details worked out-including cake, balloons and party hats, as well as the location (Nanny and Papa's). So, we turned our regular Sunday family dinner with Nanny and Papa into Moose's birthday extravaganza. Nanny made some cupcakes with candles (Sycely had determined Moose was turning 6) and I headed out to the party store for some hats, balloons and a few party favor treats for her and Moose. After nap, Sycely picked out a "Happy Birthday party dress" to wear and we headed over to Nanny and Papa's to start celebrating. She insisted that Moose ride in the back seat, next to her, wearing his seat belt on the drive over. Moose brought along his friend Pig as a guest and they appeared to have enjoyed the festivities. He seemed to especially like it when we sang him Happy Birthday and he (with Sycely's help) blew out the candles. It was a pretty cute evening and Sycely was so delighted to see her imagination's design come to fruition. The things we Mommies do to humor our little ones!

More About May

We wrapped up May in quite a whirlwind of activity and are easily settling into what is supposed to be "summer." Lem finished up the school year right before Memorial Day Weekend and got to have a whole week off with his girls before his summer classes and summer school started up this week. Of course, we spent most of our week working on projects around the house, etc, but we did get a chance to enjoy some quality backyard time together, including a picnic-the highlight of Sycely's week. Softball season has started and hockey has finally ended for Lem-the two actually overlapped for about a month or so.

Our spring skating show went off without a hitch and I'm teaching my last week (praise God!) of group lessons this Saturday. I'll continue on with my private students until July and then start my time off to get ready for Baby Ella to arrive. Her room is all clean and mostly ready. I've unpacked and washed all her clothes and gotten most things into their places in her room. We've still got some other things we need to stock up on before she gets here, but we have lots of time for that yet. My most exciting news is that Ella (after much coaxing and praying on her Mommy's part) has decided to get herself settled "head down" the way she's supposed to be which eliminates the prospect of her being breach and all the complications that go with that scenario-God is so good and faithful! We're seeing our midwives every two weeks now and will soon go to weekly appointments. We're entering the home stretch.

On the note of babies-our church babies have started to arrive. We now have 3 of the 18 new babies due to our church friends this summer. Six of us moms-to-be went to dinner together. It was such a fun outing and a nice treat for all of us who've been focused pretty much full time on gestating for the last several months. It's exciting to start to see all those babies. It sure is helping the time pass while we wait for it to be our turn! We can kind of live vicariously enjoying all these "tinys" for the next 7 weeks. It's be so much fun, and such a blessing to have all my best friends pregnant at the same time as me, with our due dates so close. It's been fun to have some of us sharing the same midwives and having group pre-natal visits too.

We spent Memorial Weekend in Homer with my Dad and Kate. We had lots of sunshine, but also LOTS of wind so that made for pretty chilly trips to the beach. Sycely had fun once we got out there and she could did with her shovel and bucket. Her and Nanny Kate even built her first sand castles together and they had lots of fun collecting sea treasures. Every trip to the beach reminds me of how magnificent God's creation is and what a blessed part of it we are. Such a grandiose setting demonstrates quite a perspective.

One evening we went down to have ice cream on the Spit. It was a pretty neat image having three generations of ice cream eaters sitting there on the bench enjoying our treat. Now, we just need to get Grandpa up here-I know we wouldn't have ANY trouble coercing him into eating some ice cream!

We will spend June plugging right along-Lem teaching summer school, me teaching skating, Sycely growing like a weed. We'll be doing some minor projects around the house, like getting our new garden going and some deep cleaning, having a garage sale, etc. I'll be doing lots of baby showers, of course as well as coaching at an upcoming competition next weekend. We'll also celebrate our 7th wedding anniversary on the 25th with some sort of something special-all while trying to enjoy whatever sunshine we get and playing outside as much as possible.

Hope you're all enjoying a lovely start to your summer!